32 years ago today a little film called Star Wars was released in only 32 theaters. To celebrate, I thought Iâ€™d repost a favorite article from a couple of years ago for Ed Copelandâ€™s Star Wars Blog-A-Thon.

Two great lessons about SW that I hold dear to this day:

* The early drafts were so stunningly awful and so unlike the finished film, itâ€™s such a great reminder that any bad script has the potential to reach great heights like Star Wars.

* Lucas had the amazing ability to scrap a script he just wrote and approach the story again from a completely different perspective, which he did repeatedly before settling on Luke and the heroâ€™s arc. We all need this quality. Too many of us get too stuck on what we write and we lack the discipline to start from scratch or even approach our stories from a different perspective just to see how it plays.

If we started a movie on the day you were born, and stretched it over your lifespan, this is where you’d be in that movie. So if you’re a teenager, you might see Luke arguing with Uncle Owen, or Cameron making a phony phone call to Ed Rooney. If you’re a retiree, you might see the Marshmallow Man, or Toto pulling away the curtain. And if you’re in your mid-thirties, you might be relieved to know that Ferris is still eating lunch, and the Millenium Falcon hasn’t left Tattoine.

My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the “Fight Club” theory, in which Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron’s imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves.

One day while he’s lying sick in bed, Cameron lets “Ferris” steal his father’s car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the “three” characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day — Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.

It isn’t until he destroys the front of the car in a fugue state does he finally get a grip and decide to confront his father, after which he imagines a final, impossible escape for Ferris and a storybook happy ending for Sloane (“He’s gonna marry me!”), the girl that Cameron knows he can never have.

*The correct answer, which Ask Metafilter missed, is to hide the bodies in vacant houses in Baltimore and board them up using the DX-46 27 caliber nail gun that you bought at the Hardware Barn with the helpful sales clerk whom you tipped 200 dollars because he earned that buck like a muthafucka man.

I’ve been somewhat limiting posts about Watchmen. I really enjoyed the book and am somewhat excited that the movie is coming out (by ‘somewhat excited’ I mean that I will actually make an attempt to see it in a theater) but there’s so much about it at the moment that it would be easy to overdose on the marketing hype. But Ebert’s blog post about it is worth a read.